CLICK HERE FOR ITALIAN VERSION
David Hockney
Secret Knowledge, Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters
New and expanded edition with 510 illustrations, 442 in colour
New York, Viking Studio, 2006
Review by Francesco Mazzaferro
Part One
[Original Version: June-July 2016 - New Version April 2019]
 |
| Fig. 1) The essay by David Hockney in the 2006 expanded edition |
Published
first in 2001 [1] and then in 2006 [2] in a new expanded edition, Secret Knowledge by David Hockney (1937,-) is perhaps the most
significant case of a writing by a contemporary artist who reinterpreted the
history of painting according to his own reading and did not only start a debate
among art critics, but also a long series of empirical researches by those who
supported or rejected his theses. Hockney, to whom the Tate Modern is devoting
a major retrospective on the occasion of the eightieth birthday next year, earned
a warm response (and notoriety) from the public with his book and the
corresponding BBC television documentary in 2001 [3]. His text was translated in
French [4], German [5], Italian [6], Chinese [7], Portuguese [8], Russian [9]
and Spanish [10].
The book
was originally due to be entitled "The
lost knowledge", indicating that for a long time (between the second
half of the fifteenth century until the early nineteenth century) the use of
optical instruments had been an essential part of doing painting, and that the
artists had lost knowledge of how to use them from the second half of the
nineteenth century, when those techniques were in fact replaced by photography.
In my opinion, the choice of the title Secret
Knowledge (aiming perhaps at creating an aura of mystery in the readers and
at increasing therefore sales) was not entirely fortunate, because it created
the false impression that the thesis underpinning the book is that painters wanted
deliberately to deceive their public, using tricks that artificially augmented
their manual skills. The opposite is true: for Hockney, as we shall see, the
use of technologies has always been part of creativity. He himself used them,
arriving recently to use Photoshop and the iPad as a support tool to his
painting. His last exhibition, Painting
and Photography, held at the Annely
Juda Fine Arts Gallery in London in 2015, has provided a reflection on how
the new optical technology of three-dimensional photographic images will help
developing a combination of painting and photography with multiple and
divergent vanishing points. In his view, the characteristics of optical
technologies have therefore always been the basis of artistic creation and innovation.
The central
argument of the thesis of Hockney in Secret
Knowledge is that one can draw a distinction, in art history, between the
times in which painters did no use of optical instruments (and therefore relied
on the direct observation of nature or made use of geometric techniques of linear
perspective, after their discovery) and the times in which they employed
instead optical technologies – i.e. "mirrors
or lenses or a combination of the two" [11] - to be able to more
easily (and especially more quickly) reproduce exact images of reality or (as
he painter called them) "living
projections" [12]. This transition did not take place, however, in the
early nineteenth century, with the invention of the camera lucida in 1807 and the photographic techniques themselves in
the mid-nineteenth century, but already in the fifteenth century (in particular
around 1430), specifically in the Low Countries. Therefore, like painting in
the Renaissance benefited from the technological revolution with the spread of
oil painting, the invention of the camera
obscura and the application of lenses to it were a second technology revolution
for artists of that time.
New
technologies allowed painters to display faces and objects with greater
precision, without the need for preparatory drawings, marking lines directly on
the canvas by tracing the images that could be projected onto the surface of
the painting. The optical image projection, therefore, provided two advantages to
the artists: the design could become more accurate and especially faster, allowing
them to perform more work in the same amount of time and thus also to earn
major sources of income. The spread of optical instruments was therefore matched
by a style change, that was not only the result of a precise aesthetic choice
(the Renaissance cult of the imitation of nature), but also of the availability
of new manual tools. The entire iconographic path between 1400 and 1600 was
thus explained by the ability to produce images in accordance with techniques
that were evolving and more and more improving. With the creation of
photography, much later on, artists developed the opposite intention to
diversify themselves from any technological observation of reality, and since
the last decades of the XIX century abandoned the use of optical instruments
and made exclusive use of direct observation of nature, i.e. what Hockney
termed as ‘eyeballing’.
What made
unique the theses of Hockney is that they were based on a radical scientific empiricism,
typical of Anglo-Saxon culture. Hockney identified the course of painting, by crossing
the observation of the art works with his own painting experience. He has
always practiced, in fact, an art that was particularly attentive to optical
phenomena. His compositions of Polaroid photos of the early eighties were
inspired by the ambition to produce an idea of space through the combination
and contrast of perspective lines and different focuses. During the few years
when he exclusively devoted himself to his research in art history, since 1999,
he stopped painting, as if he were trying to decide which direction to take also
on the basis of the study of past art. Later, when the diffusion of information
technology made available techniques that would allow anyone to produce manipulated
photos, he stated that the task of reproducing reality was now up to painting,
and returned to art.
The masters of art, and optics: Ingres
In 1999,
Hockney (who at that time lived in California) visited the exhibition "Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch"
at the National Gallery, during a stay in London. It was an impressive
exhibition (with a catalogue of about 600 pages [13]), where a section was
dedicated to the drawings that the French painter created in Rome during his
long stay between 1806 and 1820, portraying the young people who came to visit
the Eternal City. For travellers, the portraits were a souvenir, similar to
what you can still get in many tourist sites. For Ingres, it was a major source
of economic support during his Roman years. The painter had at his disposal
only a few hours: basically, he met the portrayed during their lunch break.
Hockney had
extensive experience as a portrait painter and knew how difficult it is, even
for a great artist, to create an image that is not only true, but also able to
visually translate the model's personality; in fact he mastered the techniques
of all the major ancient and modern portraitists. He therefore asked himself
how Ingres - who certainly was a great designer - was able to create, in a few
hours only, drawings that revealed such a typical characterization of portrait
subjects and began to study them with great care. He focused on the portrait of
Madame Godinot, 1829. These were the last years before the invention of
photography.
 |
| Fig. 2) Pencil portrait with a camera lucida. Source:https://robinheyden.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/david-hockney-a-bigger-exhibition/ |
 |
| Fig. 3) An engraving of 1830, showing the use of a camera lucida by a portrait painter |
Here's how
Martin Kemp described the use of a camera
lucida by Hockney, in an essay published in 2000 [18], before the
publication of Secret Knowledge: "Hockney, who has been consistently concerned
with issues of seeing, representation, perspective, space and the camera, has
recently seized on Wollaston’s invention to undertake a series of drawn
portraits. Unlike an inexperienced artist who is likely to attempt a laboured
tracing of contours, Hockney uses the instrument as a sighting device, briskly
demarcating key points of the features, such as the corners of the eyes and the
line of the mouth. The advantage is that such key registers of expression can
be rapidly established before the sitter’s expression freezes or sags. Removing
the device, he then delineates the shades and highlights through an intense
process of observation and depiction, in which his gaze incessantly
‘tick-tocks’ from face to paper at intervals of no more than two seconds. Being
portrayed by Hockney is, as I can testify, to be machine-gunned by an ocular
marksman of the first order" [19].
What are
the elements that led Hockney to believe that Ingres had made use of optical
instruments, in addition to the considerations on the incredible speed of
preparation of the drawings? There are two. First, the disproportion between
face and body (Hockney created an electronically altered image of Ingres
portrait of Madame Godinot with a visage reduced by 8% and showed that that
picture was much more balanced). In his view, it is a sign that the artist
first used the camera lucida to take note
of the features of the face (within a few minutes only), and then completed the
facial image through direct observation (based on his experience, Hockney
thought the accuracy of the portrait and the delicacy the design required one
to two hours of work) [20].
He guessed
that Ingres had later on repositioned the camera
lucida to outline the body and finish quickly the portrait, also in a few
minutes; by shifting the angle, however, the painter slightly altered the
magnification, with the result that the face and body were no longer perfectly
proportioned anymore. It is an observation which only an artist like Hockney could
make, as he was used to construct portraits by combining a series of images each
with an intentionally different focus.
And it was
here that Hockney pointed out the second clue. In the (much more summary)
track of the drawn body of Madame Godinot – he said – there was no hint of any attempt
by Ingres to proceed through trials and errors, or by "groping for" (the
English expression used by Hockney). The design was swift and recalled the
procedures used by Andy Warhol, who - for his still lives - used an opaque
projector since the Fifties, to project the image of an object on paper. Here
the British painter literally went into detail, magnifying the original Ingres
portrait and a still life by Warhol. Both magnifications revealed a technical
execution which was "precise and
accurate" [21]. In addition, in
Ingres, the cuff of the left sleeve of Madame Godinot was not dashed, and
the pattern continued directly from the cuff to the folds of the sleeves; in
the same way, also in Warhol the outline of the crystal bowl was not drawn
down, but continued directly into the shadows on the table. In both cases, for
Hockney, this revealed that the drawing was carried out with great focus on
time, and with the help of a projected image.
Hockney contrasted
the unusual combination of traced drawings by Ingres-Warhol with other three
drawings by Ingres, which were, however, "obviously eyeballed". "The lines are groped for, there are signs of hesitation. My word
'groping' suggests uncertainty: 'Exactly where is the correct position?' he
seems to ask. Notice the difference between the sleeve to the right (done in a
conventional, eyeballed way) with that on the opposite page, which is drawn
with confidence and continuous line." [22]
In fact, the
three life drawings were contrasted with the portrait of the wife of Charles
Hayward, executed by Ingres in 1812. "There
is no groping here – indeed, once again the drawing has the look of Warhol’s
traced line. It seems to have been done with a certain speed. All drawn lines
have a speed than can usually been deduced: they have a beginning and an end,
and therefore represent time, as well as space. Even a tracing of a photograph
contains more ‘time’ than the original photograph (which represents just a
fraction of a second), because the hand takes time to do it." [23]
Is this a
sufficient proof? Critics and public opinion were divided, as we shall see.
Rather than to pass judgment on this, I would like to emphasize some conceptual
and substantial aspects. First, the artist's primary task is to produce images.
For centuries it was the only professional capable of carrying out this social
function. Second, time is money, both for the artist as well as, in this case,
for the portrayed subject. Third: art is integral part of the technological
innovation of its time. Fourth, the use of techniques to improve the artist’s productivity
is also part of his genius and his manual skills. Fifth: the proof of the use
of optical technologies has to be found primarily in the images (Hockney
mentioned several times the method of Roberto Longhi and the value that he attached
to images as primary sources).
But what is
all the more striking is that the logic of Hockney’s demonstrations ultimately
resided in his experimental ability to reproduce the same results with the same
tools and procedures. His investigation was Galilean, experimental, and
entirely empirical.
Barbara
Bolt [24], a contemporary "painter-philosopher" to use the expression
used in his day to mention Poussin (she is both an accomplished painter and a scholar
of aesthetics and philosophy), analysed the English painter’s method in the 2010
essay "The magic is in handling".
Hockney was aware to own, thanks to the decades-long exercise of his
profession, a specially trained eye to read art works; this was a skill with
which, for example, most art critic were not at ease). He then decided to cross
his skills with the study of optical techniques, the vision of the originals,
the search for the primary texts of the artists, the discussion with optics
scientists and the experimental reproduction of drawings, creating what Ms. Bolt defined as "a complex and
idiosyncratic methodology". Today the content of the thesis of Hockney is
known as "the Hockney-Falco thesis", because it was also elaborated by
physicist Charles M. Falco. But the point here is primarily on the art research
method: a "Hockney" method, which has given way to an infinite number
of tests in an attempt to reproduce, confirm or discredit his results. Bolt wrote:
"Hockney’s visual argument
demonstrates the double articulation between theory and practice, where theory
emerges from a reflexive practice at the same time that practice is informed by
theory" [25]. The consequences were
even greater: "His thesis
demonstrates the material nature of visual thinking. Whether or not one agrees with the conclusions that Hockney makes in
Secret Kowledge (and there has been
considerable criticism of the work) his insights demonstrate a very special
sort of knowing, a knowing that arises through handling materials in practice.
This form of tacit knowledge provides a very specific way of understanding the
world, one that is grounded in material practice (...)" [26]
Rewriting art history according to an
experimental method
Hockney’s
meeting in London with the Roman drawings of Ingres triggered a search which
later became, by his own admission, an obsession (between 1999 and 2001 he did
not paint anymore, but was exclusively occupied with experimental studies). The
result was an entirely personal interpretation of the work of the great masters,
from which the British painter drew the certainty that an expert reading of
pictorial images can reveal, even more than any other historical consideration,
the use of optical instruments. To this aim, he focused on a number of details
of pictorial representation: the creases in the clothes, the glint of armours,
the softness of angel wings, the naturalness of the still lives, the boldest
representations of foreshortening, the most perfect curves, etc. He identified
the circumstances in which the images revealed a particular ability to
represent reality accurately. He then studied the general properties of the
images displayed by his previous colleagues over the centuries: the alignment
of the linear perspective, the ratio of the parts to the entire body, the relationship
between the figures in the compositions, the location of the light sources and
the use of shadows. He focused on all cases that seemed to reveal special
effects, as if the painting had been artfully constructed in a complex manner. He
collected physically (ordering them in chronological order) the colour
reproductions of all paintings in which the visual accuracy corresponded to the
complexity of the composition, creating a "Great Wall" of pictures, and used it as a comparative tool to analyse
the history of art as a whole. This was indeed the device he used to reflect on
the history of art. His method was exclusively inductive: it is not the history
of art to detect the characteristics of the pictures, but the combined reading of
common details in many of the pictures to call for general consequences.
 |
| Fig. 4) A detail of the Great Wall by David Hockney. The Wall was exhibited at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco for the exhibition A Bigger Exhibition in 2013. Source: https://twitter.com/rsimmon/status/414117367455973376 |
There is no
doubt that such an approach, de facto
ignoring the mainstream narrative of art history, led to polarised reactions.
The book by Hockney created a real uproar. In the third part of this post, we
will deal with the receipt of the criticism. Already now, we should note that
there were two types of responses: on the one hand by those who focused on
technological aspects (statements on the aptitude of the optical instruments,
often against the background of experimental cross checking) and on the other hand
by those who made considerations on style, iconography and composition. In
particular, we will focus our attention on the debate around the use of the camera obscura by Caravaggio: here some thought
that Hockney provided a new reading of Caravaggio's realism, while others considered
his theses as entirely trivial or far-fetched.
Having
placed chronologically all the works on the Great
Wall, from medieval Byzantine style to post-impressionism painting, Hockney
realised that many features affecting the visual presentation of art, and which
he attributed to the presence of optical technologies, did not affirm
gradually: "The optical look arrived
suddenly, and was immediately coherent and complete. (...) The sudden change I
could see suggested to me a technical innovation rather than a new way of
looking that then led to a progressive development of drawing skills" [27]. And in his opinion, that was the result
of the spreading use of lenses and mirrors by painters in Flanders around 1430
and its transmission to Italy thirty years later, thanks to Antonello da
Messina [28]. In particular, Hockney took the view that around those decades
the painters learned how to apply lenses to the camera obscura, which had already existed for centuries as a tool
to study the reflection of images.
 |
| Fig. 5) Leonardo's drawing of a camera obscura. Source: Karel Vereycken. Source: http://ddata.over-blog.com/xxxyyy/0/31/89/29/Fusion-104/F104.8.pdf |
A camera obscura was a tool allowing to project
(albeit inverting them) three-dimensional images on surfaces, reproducing a
natural phenomenon, observed since ancient times: the inverted image of any
object is projected by the light through tiny holes applied in darkened
environments. If lenses were applied to the holes, it was possible to intensify
this natural phenomenon, projecting sharper images and focusing them, in such a
way that they would turn to be perfect (and therefore of a substantially
photographic quality). The use of the camera
obscura offered artists the opportunity to have a perfect two-dimensional representation
of a three-dimensional world at their disposal, overcoming the difficulties of
putting into perspective the objects according to the geometrical methods of
linear perspective. Yet, the camera
obscura also confronted painters with new problems, as we shall see.
 |
| Fig. 6) Reinerus Frisius Gemma, De Radio Astronomico et Geometrico (1545). Employ of a camera obscura to detect sunspots, Source: Wolfgang Levèvre (ed.) Inside the Camera Obscura – Optics and Art under the Spell of the Projected Image https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/Preprints/P333.PDF |
 |
| Fig: 7) Image of a camera obscura, with Brunelleschi's dome in the background, attributed to Stefano della Bella (1610-1664), Library of Congress, Washington (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura#/media/File:Camera_obscura2.jpg) |
 |
| Fig. 8) A bi-directional camera obscura in an engraving from Ars Magna by Athanasius Kircher (1646) |
 |
| Fig. 9) John Hinton, Representation of a camera obscura, Universal Magazin, 1752 Source: Wolfgang Levèvre (ed.) Inside the Camera Obscura – Optics and Art under the Spell of the Projected Image https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/Preprints/P333.PDF |
Hockney took the view that painters had been using the camera obscura for centuries, to paint directly on the canvas (the procedure cannot be used for the fresco) the key elements of their compositions. In order to paint complex scenes, they had the possibility to put objects or people in front of the camera obscura one at a time, combining them (this was, in short, a kind of collage of images, much like the procedure that Hockney used for his compositions of Polaroid pictures). Alternatively, artists would have been able also to use mobile optical tools. According to the English painter, both procedures were, among others, used by Memling, Bouts, van der Goes and van Eyck in 1400, Holbein and Dürer in 1500, Caravaggio, Vermeer and Velázquez in 1600. It was the baroque world of the seventeenth century (and especially Caravaggio) to make the most intensive use of special effects. The second part of this post will be entirely dedicated to Caravaggio's use of optical tools, according to David Hockney and the Italian scholar Roberta Lapucci. Obviously, there were also great artists (Michelangelo, Poussin and Rubens) and entire schools (that of Carracci) whose works did not reveal, according to Hockney, any use of optical techniques: for them, only applied the principles of natural observation and linear perspective. Even in this case, Hockney did not make any value judgment: the use of technologies did not represent any decrease of the creative capabilities of the artist; if ever, it marked the recognition of the desire to produce special effects inducing the amazement of the customer and the public at large.
But how to
prove the use of optical techniques? Hockney knew well that, when using optical
instruments (and also a camera obscura),
each movement (the inclusion of a new object or person placed in front of the camera, or any displacement of the
canvas on which the object was projected by a lens) corresponded to a change in
focus of the image. So when one adopted these procedures to project complex
images on canvas, the result was to alter the laws of perspective or to paint
bodies that revealed imperfections in the proportion of the limbs. The eye of
Hockney identified and studied many of these cases, along with Charles Falco,
and drew the conclusion that these images could only be obtained by optical
methods.
 |
| Fig. 10) Lorenzo Lotto, Husband and wife, 1543. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
One of the cases on Hockney most dwelled was the painting Husband and wife of Lorenzo Lotto dated
1543. The focus was all on the carpet on the table. Here's how Jennifer
Ouellette explains the case: "To
test his hypothesis about the early use of optical check the validity of their
assumptions on the use of optical aids, Hockney recruited the physicist Charles
Falco, a professor of optics at the University of Arizona, who systematically
analyzed measurable distortions in early paintings. «The images themselves supply the evidence, if you know how to read them» says Falco"
 |
| Fig. 11) Lorenzo Lotto, Husband and Wife, 1543. The detail of the carpet decoration. Source: http://www.cultorweb.com/ottica2/Pittori.html |
For instance, in
Lorenzo Lotto’s late Italian Renaissance painting Husband and wife (c. 1543), the geometry keyhole pattern of the carpet loses focus as it recedes
into the painting, and oddly, there are two vanishing points clearly visible in
the detail of the fabric’s border. Had linear perspective been used, the pattern
would have receded in a straight line, the single vanishing point corresponding
to a single viewpoint. Instead, there is a kink in the pattern, which then
continues in a slightly different direction. Hockney and Falco see this as
evidence that Lotto used some sort of lens to project and trace the pattern of
the cloth, but then found that he could not keep it all in focus at the same
time, so he refocused the lens to project and trace the pattern of the cloth,
but then found that he could not keep it all in focus at the same time; so he
refocused the lens to complete the back portion of the cloth, changing the
vanishing point, which he painted ‘out of focus’ in an attempt to camouflage
the process” [29].
 |
| Fig. 12) The two vanishing points on the carpet. Source:http://www.cultorweb.com/ottica2/Pittori.html |
Another picture
that attracted the attention of Hockney was the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck. In his opinion, this picture
painted in 1434 testified the discovery of new optical technologies in
Flanders, as it is confirmed by the (at that time, highly precious) convex
mirror where the spouses are portrayed twice (once from behind and again from
the front, on a mirror placed in front of them).
 |
| Fig. 13) Jan Van Eyck, Arnolfini Portrait, 1434. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
Hockney wrote:
"This is van Eyck’s Arnolfini
Wedding of 1434. I have admired the
picture longer than any other in this book, and have gone back to look at the
real one again and again [Editor's note: at the National Gallery in London].
There is the convex mirror again. If you were to reverse the silvering, and
then turned it round, this would be all the optical equipment you would need
for the meticulous and natural-looking detail in the picture. The chandelier has always fascinated me. It
was done without any detailed underdrawing or corrections (it’s the only object
in the picture to have been painted like that), amazing for such a complicated
foreshortened form. Van Eyck could have hung the panel upside down next to the
viewing hole and painted it directly, following the forms he could see on the
surface. Notice how the chandelier is seen head on (and not from below, as you
would expect). This is the effect you would expect with a mirror-lens, which
must be level with the objects you want to draw or paint. It would have been a
superb subject to show off his skills. Artists think of these things " [30].
 |
| Fig. 14) Jan Van Eyck, Arnolfini Portrait, detail, 1434 |
These words
triggered many experiments to prove or disprove the hypothesis. As we will see
in the second part, Hockney and Falco computed the exact focal distance of the
concave mirror from the chandelier but the physics professor David G. Stork,
along with a team of scientists, arrived at different conclusions and on that
basis proposed a quite different interpretation, based on standard linear
perspective [31]. Stork also examined the just mentioned painting by Lorenzo
Lotto and many others by Caravaggio among those cited by Hockney, rejecting all
Hockney-Falco interpretations. The result was a decade-long dispute.
 |
| Fig. 15) Jan Van Eyck, Arnolfini Portrait, detail, 1434 |
The role of art literature
No doubt, the
essay by Hockney belongs to contemporary art literature. But what is the role he
assigned to the art literature of past centuries? It has already been said that,
against the background of the teaching of Longhi, Hockney stated that images
speak more than written records, and that paintings are the real primary
documents. And yet, he also realized that one of the easiest objections to his
theses was the one of those who reproached him the scarcity of primary
documents. Where is the documentary evidence of the time? Why have artists
never described this procedure? Can one really believe that they managed to
keep the use of optical technology as a secret for centuries?
The painter
responded by including a review of the literature from between the sixteenth
and nineteenth centuries in Secret
Knowledge, alternating texts of scientists and painters and explaining that
they revealed the mingling between the know-how of the inventors of the lenses
and the producers of images. He explained that the awareness of the characteristics
of a camera obscura was very old
(Bacon and Witelo witnessed it already in 1200), but that the public discussion
of how to project images was always marked by great prudence (it was easy to be
accused of witchcraft in those centuries). The discovery of the interaction
between the characteristics of the lenses and the perspective laws in 1500
(Cardano, Barbaro, Kepler) rendered public more technical discussions.
Particularly stimulating is the discussion on the impact of the writings of
Giambattista della Porta and the circles surrounding Caravaggio. In 1600 (Henry
Wotton, Constantin Huygens) and in 1700 (Francesco Algarotti, Joshua Reynolds)
the references to the camera obscura
as a widely used optical technology became explicit.
Investigations after 2001: optics as the basis
for art
The 2006 edition
included additional thirty pages (pp. 199-231), reflecting the artist’s new
thinking and experiments. Reading them, one has the distinct impression that
Hockney radicalized his interpretation of the history of art. While he was
convinced in 2001 that lenses and mirrors were additional tools to the linear
perspective (and therefore many artists made use of linear perspective,
rejecting the use of optical instruments), in 2006 he was now certain that the
key features of Renaissance painting (perspective and chiaroscuro) were the inevitable
consequence of the introduction of optics into painting. He was convinced that
the history of artistic taste was driven by the characteristics of the optical
tools, which were available to the painters, and the technological performance
of the tools.
He claimed
therefore that the success of chiaroscuro in painting was the result of using
lenses and mirrors. Before the widespread use of those tools (and in all the extra-European
pictorial cultures that never used them) visual images had no shadows. It was
only since the time of lenses that the shadow became an integral element of
painting. To explain the reasons, Hockney built up a portable camera obscura (of the type widely used
type in the eighteenth century, at the time of Canaletto) to experience the
impact of external light conditions on the quality of the image projected on the
canvas. He explained that he was not only stunned about how better the camera obscura worked in the presence of
a very strong light, but that – exactly in these optimal conditions – the
projected image was characterized by particularly strong contrasts between the
illuminated parts and those in shadow [32]. Hence the conclusion that the
increasingly widespread of the parties in the dark in the painting of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the result not only of aesthetic taste,
but also of available optical tools and the techniques in which the painters 'look
at things' through these instruments.
Finally, he
went to Florence to reproduce experimentally the description that Antonio
Manetti offered of the panel which Brunelleschi had painted of the Baptistery
of Florence. The wooden board is today lost, but was described by Leon Battista Alberti as the record of the invention, in 1416, of the visual pyramid and of linear
perspective. Manetti explained that, with the help of a concave mirror,
Brunelleschi had produced in that image a foreshortened view of the Baptistery
of Florence from the inside of the central portal of Santa Maria del Fiore [33].
Hockney not only proved that a concave mirror was sufficient to reproduce the
prospective view. Replicating the experiment, he also came to the conclusion
that the discovery of the visual pyramid and the vanishing point was a direct
consequence of the technical tool used, i.e. the concave mirror.
In short,
despite controversies and vitriolic exchanges after the publication in 2001, David Hockney confirmed and even strengthened all his conclusions in the second edition of
2006. He even set the premise for his later activity as painter, documented on
the sidelines of the aforementioned shows of 2015. In the accompanying
documentation he concluded that the combination of painted images and
photographs can more easily overcome perspective, referring to new three-dimensional
digital technologies.
"Painters have always known there is something wrong with perspective. The problem is the foreground and the vanishing point. The reason we have perspective with a vanishing point, is that it came from optics. I am sure that that’s what Brunelleschi did. He used a five inch diameter concave mirror to project the Baptistry onto his panel. This gives automatically a perspective picture, just like a camera would. This is why there is always a void between you and the photograph. I am taking this void away, to put you in the picture. I made the paintings of the card players first. That helped me work out how to photograph them. Everything in the photographs is taken very close. The heads the jackets and shirt and shoes are all photographed up close. Each photograph has a vanishing point, so instead of just one I get many vanishing points. It is this that I think gives them an almost 3D effect without the glasses. I think this opens up photography into something new.
NOTES
[1] Hockney,
David – Secret Knowledge. Rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters,
London, Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2001, 296 pages.
[2] Hockney,
David – Secret Knowledge. Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters,
New York, Viking Studio, 2006, 328 pages.
[3] David
Hockney's secret knowledge; Randall Wright, film producer; Films for the
Humanities (Firm); British Broadcasting Corporation; BBC Worldwide Americas,
Inc.; Princeton, N.J.; Films for the Humanities and Sciences, ©2002.
[4]
Hockney, David - Savoirs secrets: les techniques perdues des maîtres anciens,
Paris: Seuil, 2001, 296 pages.
[5]
Hockney, David - Geheimes Wissen: verlorene Techniken der alten Meister,
München, Knesebeck, 2001, 296 pages.
[6] Hockney, David - Il segreto svelato: tecniche e
capolavori dei maestri antichi, Electa, 2002, 236 pages.
[7] デイヴィッド・ホックニ - , 秘密の知識,巨匠も用いた知られざる技術の解明 /青幻舎, 2006,
266 pages.
[8] Hockney, David - O conhecimento secreto:
redescobrindo as técnicas perdidas dos grandes mestres, São Paulo, Cosac
Naify, 2001, 296 pages.
[9] Хокни, Дэвид - Секреты старых картин, Арт-родник,
2004, 236 pages.
[10]
Hockney, David - El conocimiento secreto: el redescubrimiento de las técnicas
perdidas de los grandes maestros, Barcelona, Ediciones Destino, 2003, 296
pages.
[11] Hockney,
David – Secret Knowledge. (2006) … (quoted), p. 12
[12] Hockney,
David – Secret Knowledge. (2006) … (quoted), p. 12
[13] The
catalogue (in the version at the Metropolitan Museum in New York) is available
on the Internet at https://archive.org/stream/PortraitsbyIngresImageofanEpoch#page/n3/mode/2up.
[14] Hockney,
David – Secret Knowledge. (2006) … (quoted), p. 260
[15] Hockney,
David – Secret Knowledge. (2006) … (quoted), p. 260
[16] Hockney,
David – Secret Knowledge. (2006) … (quoted), p. 12.
[17] Hockney,
David – Secret Knowledge. (2006) … (quoted), p. 13.
[18] Kemp,
Martin – Visualizations: the Nature Book of Art and Science, University of
California Press, 2000, 202 pagine.
[19] Hockney,
David – Secret Knowledge. (2006) … (quoted), p. 261.
[20] Hockney,
David – Secret Knowledge. (2006) … (quoted), p. 23.
[21] Hockney,
David – Secret Knowledge. (2006) … (quoted), p. 23.
[22] Hockney,
David – Secret Knowledge. (2006) … (quoted), p. 26.
[23] Hockney,
David – Secret Knowledge. (2006) … (quoted), p. 26.
[24] Practice
as research: approaches to creative arts, edited by Estelle Barrett and Barbara
Bolt, London, New York, I.B. Tauris and Co Ltd, 2007, 205 pages. Quotation at
page 29.
[25] Practice
as research:... (quoted), p. 29
[26] Practice
as research:... (quoted), p. 29ù
[27] Hockney,
David – Secret Knowledge. (2006) … (quoted), p. 51.
[28] Hockney,
David – Secret Knowledge. (2006) … (quoted), p. 99.
[29] Ouellette, Jennifer - Black Bodies and
Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics, New York, London, Penguin
Books, 2005, 336 pages.
[30] Hockney,
David – Secret Knowledge. (2006) … (quoted), p. 82.
[32] Hockney,
David – Secret Knowledge. (2006) … (quoted), p. 200.
[33] Hockney,
David – Secret Knowledge. (2006) … (quoted), p. 212.
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento